Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @11:51AM
from the also-detects-invasion-by-mothra dept.

itwbennett writes "Softbank, Japan's third largest carrier, has teamed up with Sharp to create a radiation detector chip for the latest model in the company's popular, bare-bones Pantone line of smartphones. The chip 'can detect gamma radiation in the air at doses of between 0.05 and 9.99 microsieverts per hour,' according to an IDG News Service report. 'The phone then uses its GPS to place readings on a map. Due to go on sale in July, it runs Android 4.0 and features standard functionality for Japanese handsets, including mobile TV, touch payments and infrared transmission.'"

Seems to me that's it's too low on both the top end and bottom end. You couldn't use it for detecting real hotspots on the top end and it's so sensitive on the bottom end that even exposure to direct sunlight will have everyone panicking. I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.

It's made to capitalize on irrational post-Fukushima fear. There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.

The device is made to be extra-sensitive because if it didn't pick up something, people would feel silly for having bought one. (Which they should.)

Yeah, these are going to sell like hotcakes. Not because they are useful, but because people are terrified of the possibility of being "exposed to icky radiation".

I'm certain that their sales will be immediately undercut by cell phone cases that include radiation-detection badges. Only the paranoid-1337 will spend the extra to have detection fully integrated into their phone.

So that sensitivity range seems reasonable - note the "per hour" in there. Not radiation levels that would put you in hospital with 3 weeks to live, but the kind of levels above background that might be a concern longterm. Having a sensor that allows you to measure that throughout the day, wherever you go, sounds more useful than spot checks or relying (solely?) on government-provided figures.

Whether you should bother, what levels are safe, etc, let people figure that out for themselves. I don't see any harm in adding some datapoints...

Do you know anything about the Port of Oakland's scanner (in the San Francisco Bay Area) for trucks carrying containers? I have a truck driver friend who has to drive his truck through that scanner every time he picks up a container from there. Apparently, it's not that bad for him because he does long routes and doesn't go back and forth from the Port that often, but he knows some other drivers that have to come back from that Port up to 10 times a day on some of the busier days.

HEMXRIS Occupants
â"HEMXRISs are designed so that the radiation dose levels within the driverâ(TM)s cab and at the inspector work-stations (systems operators) will be below 0.00005 rem in any one hour. With an annual work limit of 2,000 hours, this hourly dose limit will prevent annual cumulative exposures that exceed the limit of 0.1 rem in a year.

The airport security max would peg the detector since 0.25 uSv in 1 minute = 15 uSv/hr. Of course the CRT won't even register. The dental X-ray will certainly peg it. Tokyo, normal airport security scan, and in-flight will fall within its range (all at the upper end).

You live in an environment, and you're interested (for whatever reason) to measure 1 aspect of that environment's condition. That's all there is to it, and that's all the 'legitimacy' you need.

You seem to be taking the libertarian view that because it is not forbidden to do something, therefore you should do it to prove you have the right to do so.

OP wasn't saying you shouldn't be allowed to have radiation detectors, only that they are of no sensible use to most people, and this is just exploiting to people's fear to make some money. But, hey, that's not illegal, so it must be OK right?

It's made to capitalize on irrational post-Fukushima fear. There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.

As I consider myself an arm-chair ocean conservationist, I have been horrified by the increase in popularity of sushi over the last 2 decades, and the steady decline of the bluefin tuna population which has only narrowly escaped the endangered species list as a direct result of overfishing. Now, I can only hope that the trendy raw fisheaters continue their disgusting culinary habit, and if not become extinct themselves, at lease will be prevented from reproducing. [google.com] Care for some sushi, friend?

Uhm. There are other species of fish than bluefin tuna. I really like sushi but I certainly won't eat bluefin tuna, dolphinmeat (no. freaking. way.) sushi or any other endangered species. I also like farmed fish.

Of course, if we need to ban fishing completely to preserve wild fish then so be it.

There is no legitimate reason for you do be able to decide what a legitimate reason is. "I want to" is a legitimate reason for me.

I think you are interpreting the word "legitimate" to mean "legal". In this context, it just means "plausible" or "sensible".

In other words, it is being used in the sense that there is no legitimate reason to walk around with a tinfoil hat to ward off alien mind-control rays. That doesn't mean you are not perfectly entitled to if you want.

This phone is a ruse, to captalise by make people think they can manage this. In other words, it is a comfort item, not an actual safety measure.

It also works as a propaganda item. "Testing radiation levels is the new normal, it's even on my phone, see!" The management of public perception is far easier than the management of spent fuel in reactor 4.

The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.

The new, official story - just made public - [reuters.com] is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving-face.

This phone is a ruse, to captalise by make people think they can manage this. In other words, it is a comfort item, not an actual safety measure

Well thats just foolish, of course its useful if its sample rate is fast enough. I strongly encourage my genetic competitors in the race of evolution to not worry about exposing themselves and their kids to excess radiation.

Hold it over each farmers market table and buy from the one with the lower reading.

Concerned about lifetime exposure? Wave it over a granite countertop and then a corian countertop and tell me which you want in your food prep area.

Granite doesn't look good once its got "some wear and tear" and its soooo stereotypical 00's housing bubble (kind of like avocado appliances screamed 70s) that its not cool anymore. So Corian for me.

I'm hardly in the class of FUD'ed WRT to radiation. None the less if I lived in Japan and one farmers market table pinned the needle on my phone and the other one was normal, I'd choose the normal one.

Samt thing happened on 9/11 where the government claimed the air was safe to breathe, but then people started getting sick, so the government had to admit it lied. What use is having regulation if the politicians or bureaucrats simply ignore them (or lie)? Regulations don't work because the regulators aren't doing the job

I'd love to be scared by the radiation release at this point, as I enjoy a good fright, but how many people have died to date of exposure to the radiation? How many people will die as a result of the exposure? Will it really top the loss of life on the day of the earthquake? Is it worse to be exposed to that much radiation, or the amount of toxic agriculture pestiside and industrial era polution crap I live with every day in the suburbs?

We are surrounded by risks of many types both within our bodies genome, the enviornment, and behaviors we have. I just can't wrap my head around hyper focusing on one and ignoring all the others.

Well since the WHO don't seem to have found any particularly nasty areas... not that bad? Safety standards are set incredibly low and this generates an intense pressure to give out the lowest possible numbers when reporting radiation. If there was less irrational panic then people might be more honest about the numbers. Think of it this way: It's at least 2.5x as bad as it was declared to be, maybe a whole lot worse (as you seem to think) and yet there are no discernible health effects (except those ca

According to a documentary they're showing at the moment, Chernobyl - after well over two decades - is currently inhabited by mutated zombie like beings. It's not really surprising people would be concerned.

The World Health Organization released its own study this week concluding that residents around the Fukushima plant had been exposed to up to 20 times normal background radiation in the first year after the accident. That was still within the WHO's recommended emergency limit.

Yes, absolutely horrible. How many calculated phantom deaths are we at now?

We easily expose ourselves to 100,000x as much carcinogens in every day life, out of sheer ignorance, but a anything with word radiation is horrible.

1. People were moved out of danger area2. People are kept at a safe distance

Compare this to something like Bhopal, where no one gives a shit if thousands and thousands keep drinking heavily polluted ground water around that disaster that are outside any safe limit set by any agency. Oh w

Compare this to something like Bhopal, where no one gives a shit if thousands and thousands keep drinking heavily polluted ground water around that disaster that are outside any safe limit set by any agency.

Being concerned about the potential long term health risks of a radiation leak, and being concerned about the plight of poor people horribly treated by a large multinational corporation are not mutually exclusive.

The real, long-term prospect for anyone living in the Fukushima shadow is too horrible to contemplate.

Yeah. Maybe 0.4 extra people will statistically get cancer 30 years from now that wouldn't have gotten it anyway. Oh wait, I've contemplated it.

The new, official story - just made public - [reuters.com] is that the initial release from TEPCO was 2.5 X higher than was admitted at the time. If this is what they are recalcitrantly admitting to, after incontrovertible evidence, how bad is it really? After all, the utility and the government both demonstrate they cannot be trusted to prefer health and safety over saving

I actually foresee the opposite: people are scared of radiation because they can't sense it directly - it's dangerous, but they have no idea of the magnitude of the radiation around them, other than some officials who promise them that it's too small to be worried about. Well, those officials are often full of shit, so why believe them now?

So give people a bunch of sensors. They'll watch them constantly for about a week, and pretty soon they'll discover that ambient radiation is negligible in everything t

I totally agree with this. The typical fearmonger will lose a lot of momentum when surrounded by people who all got bored watching their phone-based radiation detectors spike by several orders of magnitude as they walk around day to day. The fearmonger survives on attention and ignorance of others, not on shoulder shrugs.

Bring on the phone-based radiation detectors. I'd like to have one, even though I would also get bored with it after a week. It would still be occasionally useful, just as the compas

irrational behavior is great for sales. this wasn't designed by scientifical scientists who know science, it's the equivalent of cricket cellular in japan. they're years ahead of us in being a technological society over in japan, so your phone manufacturer is the first person you think of when you suddenly need radiation detection:

"I received many tweets asking for some way to detect radiation" after the disaster, said Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son at a press conference in Tokyo. "So I decided, 'let's do it.'"

"fuck, why not?" Son continued, "we almost launched a phone that microwaves your food while it's in your mouth, but this fukushima disaster made that obsolete pretty quickly. we

I'm not saying it matters a lot, the likelihood of being exposed to an instant onset source of 10 or more is so close to 0 as to be effectively 0. It would however be extremely bad form if the sensor simply reports 0 (either due to software limit checking or the sensors failure mode alone) when the dosage is in fact 15microsieverts.

Sure about your numbers? "one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.

I agree the high end is ridiculously low. That thing is going to go bonkers if you have it in your pocket while getting a dental xray. You read stuff on wiki abou

"one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.

Seems to me that's it's too low on both the top end and bottom end. You couldn't use it for detecting real hotspots on the top end and it's so sensitive on the bottom end that even exposure to direct sunlight will have everyone panicking. I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.

Hmm, it detects any dosage above ~0.05 uSv per hour, eh?

A quick check of my XKCD radiation chart, and I find that a normal day's exposure is 10 uSv, which corresponds to an hourly rate of 0.4 uSv.

No it will be "reading low" pretty much all of the time — which is what people expect. People are in general malinformed about radiation, but the concept of non-zero background radiation is not so unknown, especially in Japan after 3/11.

Normal background radiation in the Tokyo area is about 0.15 uSv/h, so just at the bottom of this phone's range, but enough that people can see it's working.

It will immediately make people aware that 'radiation' is like everything else. It's the dose that make the poison. That would go a long way to reducing unreasonable fear of radiation.

An accumulation of (relatively) low doeses can still poison you. That's why they measure the limits for nuclear power workers (and X-ray technicians and so on) on a cumulative or per annum basis, not just as one-off maximum allowable doses.

Totally, but if I can hook get the tricorder app to measure the data my nerd credentials will go through the roof! If only Softbank had a good enough infrastructure to deliver telephone calls to my appartment...

Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...

Unless it contains a Geiger–Müller tube, it isn't much of a Geiger counter. Since this phone apparently contains a 'chip'(quite possibly just a CCD of some sort packaged so that most of the pxel hits can be assumed to be from high energy radiation, possibly something cleverer/more specialized), and since cramming a gas tube and high-voltage driver circuits into a cellphone is a pain, I'm guessing that there is nothing 'Geiger' about this counter...

Since this phone apparently contains a 'chip'(quite possibly just a CCD of some sort packaged so that most of the pxel hits can be assumed to be from high energy radiation, possibly something cleverer/more specialized),

Its interesting to speculate about "the chip". I'm guessing a scintillation counter like you're describing would be too complicated and doing the old "count SEU in a bank of ram" trick just isn't sensitive enough at the low end, or at least at a reasonable sample rate. The way I'd design it is a traditional ionization counter by playing wire bond games inside a ceramic chip with the input lead of a really high impedance op-amp, all on one little chip. The trick is building a ionization chamber that is no

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to dig up anything on Samsung's website that provided me any clues. They have plenty of fab projects(including some sensor stuff) and various high-end measuring instruments and things; but the only references to this gamma-detector chip were stories about this cellphone. It'd be nice to find a datasheet and a digikey catalog number...

Please describe the ionization chamber in more detail, and why it would be so sensitive to movement.

stereotypical enclosure full of gas (air). wire or something down the center maybe with spring for large chamber or just dangling. Stick a modest voltage on that wiggly wire and measure the current flowing in/out due to nearby ionizing radiation. wiggling that wire or the enclosure/shield is going to induce a signal in it. Whoops. Now a good DSP analyzer can probably process out everything but small constant currents and single event RC time constant pulses, in other words ignore 60 hz hum and speech n

>>>You just say that nonsense about the scanners because they offend your delicate psuedo-libertarian sensibilities.

No I say that "nonsense" because Xray machines do malfunction from time-to-time, and have been known to irradiate patients with deadly levels. That is why regulations have been passed to inspect Xray machines every few months, to insure they are still working properly & outputting safe levels rather than deadly levels. (Meanwhile the TSA machines are never inspected. They could

No I say that "nonsense" because Xray machines do malfunction from time-to-time, and have been known to irradiate patients with deadly levels. That is why regulations have been passed to inspect Xray machines every few months, to insure they are still working properly & outputting safe levels rather than deadly levels. (Meanwhile the TSA machines are never inspected. They could be emitting cancer-causing levels and no one would know.)

According to the linear hypothesis there is no level other than zero which does not cause cancer. In the aggregate even though the scanners may pose a trivially small individual risk the chance of someone somewhere winning the TSA cancer lottery is significant.

Replace the scanners with a guillotine that with some random probability of one in hundreds of thousands to tens of millions it chops off the head of someone going thru a TSA line. This is essentially what the scanners are doing except victims will

In which case, it must really suck that you get a small amount of radiation exposure from your own body, eh?

Personally I don't care about my risks because I have better things to do. You'll ruin your life and health worrying about all of this noise that could happen... it is not worth doing.

As a policy matter it is important to decision makers and the general public who care about more than just themselves. Unless I bungled a decimal or unit which I do from time to time and you chart the backscatter figures to LNT line it is one early cancer death per 5 million scans. Assume TSA processes ~1.8m peeps daily.

There are better than half a million cancer deaths in the US alone every year. Your ~131 extra annual cancer deaths is a 0.03% increase, at most.In other words, even if your estimates of premature cancer deaths is correct, the change as a result of the TSA scans will be lost in the noise....

Yes you are 100% correct.

The TSA kills ~131 people per year on x-ray backscatter devices not able to detect internal explosives or petn laden underwear but hey no biggie cause CrimsonAvenger says these deaths will be lost in the noise of people who would have died of cancer anyway.

One thing I'm having trouble understanding is why it is necessary to stop with cancer? I mean since 100% of everyone living dies why not just let some three letter agency kill a few thousand random people a year just for kicks...

IIRC, decent dosimeters require re-calibration at least yearly if not more often. (Sounds like they don't respond well to sudden shock and this increases accuracy drift.)

I wonder how SoftBank is going to handle this. I don't think people are going to appreciate a test sample being delivered to their home, and I think employees wouldn't appreciate it in stores/kiosks. I know 7Elevens sell everything in Japan, but not sure this is going to fit in well on the kombini scene.

Depends on the tech. Those old fashioned static charged human hair things were awful. Geiger tubes used in a high flux environment need it pretty bad. Geigers in general need it... sorta, due to long term gas leakage and quench gas issues. solid state is not nearly as drifty.

Its kind of like measuring length and declaring that since my old gauge block set technically required annual recertification that means no one would ever buy a wooden ruler, because how would be ship them all to Starrett

The concept of a tritium backlight for cellphone is strangely appealing to me. Occasionally you see a promotional bling-phone that costs $50K or whatever which is merely a plain old $200 phone encrusted with $49800 worth of ugly gold and ugly gemstones. But a tritium backlight would be so freaking expensive it probably would be a genuine $100K phone that really internally contains $100K worth of stuff (stuff in this case being H3).

I would think the first course of action if you're worried about radiation poisoning is to move to a place where this app would be useless (ie: low or no radiation from human sources).

Although, knowing our wonderful eastern friends, they're probably trying to make nuclear superheroes and this chip/app/phone is just a means to sniff out the Hulk from the general population. I'm assuming it can detect gamma radiation as well, so obviously we should put it to it's best use.

Run away? Emigrate from Japan? I heard this from a Japanese w.r.t. the earthquake and nuclear situation: "Yes, it sucks, but it is home after all so you try and make do". Outside the stricken areas (i.e. pretty much outside tsunami-ravaged bits of land) people do not worry much about radiation (though those that do get the spotlight) and pretty much go on with their lives. There is also a lot of independent monitoring going on, which has caught the occasional contaminated foodstuffs, but nothing more seriou

So, there's 4 types of ionizing radiation. Gamma is only one. Is Gamma the type which is mainly radiated by the isotopes of concern? Or because that's the easiest/cheapest to create a detector chip for, so they slap one in a phone, creating a 1/4 solution to the problem, and market it to the public as a more or less total solution to the problem?

For the particular case of detecting reactor isotopes, is Gamma radiation even particularly useful?

Today, radiation is a scary mystical thing, partially because people don't realize how common it is. Perhaps by having these detectors everywhere people will learn that radiation isn't the frighteningly scary thing that the media tells them it is. They will start measuring radiation everywhere: their friends, them selves, their electronics, the air, the soil, the rain, their mom's Fiestaware, their Grandma's Depression Glass. And they will start to see statistics and patterns. When they don't suddenly c

I find it fascinating that there is so much misinformation and misunderstanding about what harmful radiation is (some is not as harmful). If you are insterested in learning more about the link between cell phones, EMF radiation and cancer, watch this video: http://emf.lemuriangirl.com/ [lemuriangirl.com]